Suppose I should say this in the first sentence: I use AdBlock. I like using AdBlock since it blocks and removes the annoying flash ads, animated ads, music playing or other noise-making ads, most video pre-roll ads etc.

This is especially true for websites which add a huge leaderboard ad to the very top of the website before their head content, thus pushing their entire website down by about 100 pixels. Or those that have an annoying ad placed right in the middle of their site’s main content, like halfway through a news post, breaking up the flow of the article.

The main unfortunate side-effect of this mass-blocking is that non-intrusive advertising gets blacked out also. Now I’m not a complete Nazi towards online advertising, I don’t mind the banner ads, small boxes etc. that sit off to the side or the bottom of the site, especially when the site owner puts them there knowing full well that they are most likely to only get revenue from impressions as opposed to clicks.

Nor do I mind advertising that isn’t completely corporate driven, this particular example being Project Wonderful. They are one ad network I’ve expressly allowed to show in my filters, along with a bunch of other sites I either don’t mind supporting, that I know don’t have intrusive advertising, or (unfortunately) that don’t work when you turn off the ads – several site video players are notorious for that.

I know several site owners who do expressly ask – and always in an off-the-cuff sort of passing mention, never specifically pushing people to do so – to whitelist their site in AdBlock for the revenue, and in most cases I’m cool with that particularly if I’m an avid reader and like what they’re doing. Sites/comics like Real Life Comics, Nerd Junkies, Manly Guys Doing Manly Things I keep AdBlock off as I both enjoy their content and they don’t run intrusive advertising.

One aspect that I really hate though, is when people specifically ask for ad clicks. Especially when it’s always against the ToS of whatever ad network you’re in to game the system in any way or to ask people to submit invalid clicks.
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My resolution for this year is…

3840×1080

Alright, in all seriousness I’m not one for having New Year resolutions. That and the screen resolution joke is made way too much. Although it would be nice to have a second 1080p monitor just so that my secondary can match the size of my primary…

Anyway, I’m not going to label this as a resolution as such, but I will try to make sure that I blog just a bit more this year. I will also look into streaming a lot more on Twitch, I’ve been lacking in that aspect a fair bit.

Some of the things I hope to achieve this year, in no particular order:

• Get a YouTube partnership.
• Upgrade my PC rig – ideally once the LGA-2011 components start coming out.
• Attend almost all the anime cons, depending on timeframe.
• Get a smartphone and start posting tweets and pictures on-the-go.

Not much else I can really think of at present. I suppose that’s good because if I do think or anything else after this, it just goes to show that it really doesn’t work as a resolution at all if I can’t remember it after only two days!

And to think it hasn’t even been a few weeks since the Steam Autumn Sale, in which my credit card was royally buttfucked. And now we’re already into the Christmas Holiday Sale… I’ve barely managed to pay off my current maxed-out card (thank you very much Mr. “Can you take a cheque some other time?” Eirtakon Treasurer who owes me some games prizes and taxi trips…) and now I’m going to be loading more onto it.

Ah well, at least it makes for cheap Christmas presents for those I know who use Steam, which is pretty much Avy and… Yea.

So, the “funky” thing that Steam are doing with the sale this year is by playing around by giving everyone gifts via the Steam Inventory system. Using objectives (á la the Summer Sale with its prize tickets), you will either earn gifts or lumps of coal. There are a wide variety of gifts you can receive. One little bit of a “fuck you” though are coupons for however much of whatever, but for the most part they can’t be redeemed until AFTER the sale, and most of them are worthless considering the discount on the coupon is less than the discount offered during the sale. Oh, and they also don’t work for anything released after the sale, either.

So, the other thing is a lump of coal. However, here’s where it gets a bit interesting. You can craft seven lumps of coal into a gift (whether it’s random or chosen, who knows), or you can keep all your coal and each lump grants you an extra entry into the overall sweepstakes where the winners will win FUCKING EVERYTHING ON STEAM. There’s also some wishlist grants (50 x Top 10, 100 x Top 5) and 1k Valve Complete Packs too, but meh.

So anyway, I’ll be updating this post during the sale with my progress with the objectives and what crap gifts, or coal I earned. Yay…

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So, last night I booted up Modern Warfare 3 – having sent the order for my sister to pick it up while she was in the Centre to use up €73 worth of gift cards I keep forgetting about – with the intention of starting to stream my playthrough of the Veteran difficulty campaign. What I was not expecting was to actually finish it in the one night. It is annoyingly short, even on the hardest difficulty.

Upon finishing the campaign, scrolling the credits and returning to the main menu, the campaign time counter read 5 hours, 46 minutes. Five and a half hours for a campaign on the hardest difficulty possible is really not great at all, even more so when you consider how much time you have to use up replaying certain parts again based on how badly you do at it and how much you die.

Bearing that in mind, this would probably indicate that running through the campaign on the easiest difficulty would probably take no more than three hours. For such a high-profile game, this is woefully short. Something that a member of my stream chat mentioned about it:

It’s an interactive action movie disguised as an FPS war simulator.

In fact, the campaign is probably something that’s better made as an action movie. Not that I want to or expect to see a movie tie-in, but if it were to happen, it’d probably do well.

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Well, another year done and dusted. It’s definitely been the biggest and longest year I’ve contributed to, and the amount of work done over the weekend was quite a lot too. The amount of feedback via social media has been immense, so much so it pretty much completely took away most of Monday just to keep an eye on all the Facebook posts and tweets sent at us – yes, it’s probably Mark’s job, but as I believe he was part of the crew who went out on the Sunday night for the after-party, I think a sore head was probably being rested that day!
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Well, I had tuned in hoping that Power would somehow manage to perform a miracle and win the race to hopefully win the championship instead of Dario “Francheaty” Franchitti, but I think I speak for everyone by saying I did not expect something like this to happen.

I know I’d given stick about it before, especially the oval variant of it – but I tell you now, I can’t wait for the new Dallara IR12 to come in next year, with all of its advances in safety designed to offer increased driver protection, and to stop them flipping over, especially following wheel-to-wheel contact.

Dallara IR12 "Oval"

Alright, I know that this new functionality has only just been released, but it already has a bit of an impact when it comes to me and my usage of Facebook.

As you probably know, I interact on Facebook through two primary methods: my own personal profile, and my Page. I initially made my page after a few… instances where people who were following me for all of my gaming and YouTube related stuff started getting a little too keen on my profile on Facebook. This then spurred me to create a second Twitter account and a Facebook page to handle the people who only knew me from my dealings on the Internet.

At that point, it was the best course of action since I didn’t want to start opening up my personal profile and everything I might say, to people I didn’t really fully know or trust enough. Of course, that’s not to say that everything I post is completely private, in fact most of the time I will post the same thing to my main Twitter and my Facebook profile simultaneously with TweetDeck, but it helps to have that individual post privacy selector on Facebook to keep things only to people who I know.

However, not long after that I started to realise that gaming and YouTube related stuff actually constituted quite an amount of my overall activities, and as such my personal Twitter has a lot less going on now than it used to. It kinda shows in my gaming Twitter as I’ve made over 1500 Tweets from that account since I started it in December last year while my main account has dropped from around 300 Tweets a month to just 100 a month.

So, this new subscribe functionality on Facebook is making me think about whether I should delete my secondary accounts and use just the one once again. Everyone could continue to follow me on Twitter, and those who I don’t fully know could just subscribe to my Facebook rather than having to add me as a friend. This would then enable a fair bit more functionality that I’ve had to stop using recently, or find a workaround for, since some Facebook tools don’t work with Pages, including YouTube Autoshare, Raptr’s connections, and others.

The main benefactors from this change that I know would be higher-profile YouTubers who are well-known for who they are, rather than their online persona. Two who immediately come to my mind would be Jory Caron and Jonny Paula from the old “Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?” YouTube show, but it could also be of use to some other smaller people like MegaGWolf, and to some extent (and I can’t believe I’m actually saying her name) ssskinner.

Right now I’m still debating what to do. The main things I have against merging them would be the fact that my second accounts are already too well-established to really just pull the plug on them, and they are helping me to keep my two “audiences” separate.

I suppose it’s something that would have to be thought of over the next while, I’d say it would all depend on the uptake of the new subscription functionality.

So I’ve been playing around with Dxtory recently, testing it to see if it’s a good alternative for PC recording compared to what I currently use – FRAPS. Both programs do the job, but both of them also appear to have different wants and costs associated with them, as well as having a different end result.

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So, I went off to the MyMeteor website to send a web text in reply to a text I just received on my mobile. Generally when I’m at home, or otherwise near an available computer, I send a web text to save myself the 12c that I may otherwise need at some point, and it also helps to extend the length of time before I have to top up again – generally a single €20 top up will last me at least a few months.

Upon the page loading, I noticed that it had been given a little facelift, with a nice fresher-looking login screen.

After getting in, I noticed a myriad of new links on the left-hand side, and one which piqued my interest long enough to delay me sending my text for a while, was this “My Usage” tab. Inside was basically a breakdown of all my calls and texts, similar to what you would get on a bill. It definitely reaffirmed the fact that I don’t actually use my phone very much!

However, I began to notice the charges in my usage history were not adding up too well with the advertised 29c a minute anytime to any network or landline plan I’m supposedly on.
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So, much earlier this morning when I went to just randomly watch a stream over on NGame.tv, I was greeted with a very large and red error message:

NGame, flagged...?

When the bloody fuck did that happen? I had been watching the site without any problems 3 hours before that and got nothing in my way. A quick look on Twitter shows that other had been experiencing the issue too. Since I have faith in Avast, I went ahead anyway and had no issues at all.

I will point out that at this point in time, the Safe Browsing diagnostic page for NGame was completely clean, nothing mentioned.

Fast-forward to about an hour ago, and…

Say wha?

Jesus, where the hell did that come from. But on further reading I notice something else – IT’S CLAIMING MY SITE IS INFECTED NOW TOO?!?!?!

Sure enough, I go to visit my own website, and I’m greeted by the exact same big red error page. And the diagnostic for me:

...for fuck's sake.

Upon checking my Google Webmaster Tools, I was told that the page on my site in which I embed my NGame channel page was what had caused my site to be flagged also – bearing in mind they said nothing about just the physical stream video itself on my homepage – so I went to go file for a malware review after privatisation of that page until this issue blows over…

EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING LINK ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND.

As they claim: “Very rarely, it can take up to a day for malware warnings (and links to the malware review request form) to be visible in Webmaster Tools after your search has been flagged in search results. If you don’t see a warning in Webmaster Tools, but your site is flagged, please check back later.”

Searching around for other instance like this show that this is the complete opposite of “very rare”, rather it’s more of a “happens all the fucking time”.

Moral of the story? Google is shit. Go disable this stuff in Options -> Under the Bonnet -> Privacy -> Uncheck “Enable phishing and malware protection”. And then go download Avast, which has been a hell of a lot more use than this browser “feature” has.